The models that Wendelin Werner and his colleagues study can be represented as map-like figures. They study for instance universal properties of such jagged lines. (Graphic: Jason P. Miller)
In Nymphenburg on Friday, the ETH probabilist Wendelin Werner was awarded the Heinz Gumin Prize, the highest-value mathematics prize in Germany. But what does this have to do with a journey, a public transport map, and human emotions? A conversation with Wendelin Werner is like a journey - and the paths that this journey follows were drawn by chance. Werner's main field of research is probability theory, a branch of mathematics that deals with randomness. Among other things, he studies random paths, which are known as 'random walks' because their individual steps occur one after the other at random. Probabilists like Werner are especially interested in the fact that, although random events look rather chaotic on the small scale, they nevertheless often give rise to structures that humans can recognise on the large scale in the continuous world. For example, on the large scale, a random walk becomes the so-called Brownian motion, which was first described by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown in 1827. This theme is closely linked to statistical physics, where one derives the macroscopic rules that describe the behaviour of gases, for example, from the chaotic and random movements of innumerable microscopic particles.
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